Visit, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven Chatbot for health advice, which already counts Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Snapdeal founders – Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal, as its backers, has again roped in an another popular figure as its investor as it received an undisclosed amount of funding from Richard Socher, the Chief Scientist at Salesforce.

Socher, a Stanford alumni and a leader in the field of AI based in Silicon Valley, US, has invested in his personal capacity in Visit. Visit is Socher’s third investment so far as prior to this he has invested in Israel-based Zebra Medical Vision, a medical imaging insights platform, and Luka, a software development company based in San Francisco, California.

With Socher joining Delhi-based Visit as an investor, Anurag Prasad, co-founder of Visit, said, “Richard’s massive expertise in the field of AI will help us strengthen our product and machine learning efforts by leaps and bounds.”

Richard Socher, on this investment, said, “The visit app is one of the most exciting combinations of human and artificial intelligence, helping people get fast, accurate and affordable advice on their health.”

Founded in 2016 by BITS Pilani alumni Anurag, Shashvat Tripathi, Chetan Anand and Vaibhav Singh, Visit Internet Service Pvt. Ltd is headquartered in Delhi and offers personal healthcare assistant/chatbot for health queries and also provides a tele-health platform to connect to healthcare specialists. It connects users with over 2,000 doctors and specialists for treatments, prescriptions and counselling.

“Users engage with the Visit Chatbot by describing their symptoms and the bot poses a series of questions to predict the most probable diagnosis,” explained Anurag.

According to a survey report by Oracle, it was revealed that about 80 per cent of the companies surveyed are interested in making use of chatbots within a period of next 4 years so as to take their customer service to another level.

Besides being the chief scientist at Salesforce, a global CRM solutions provider, Richard Socher was also the founder and CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind that was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Metamind is an automatic image recognition powered by AI.

Recent Chatbot Startups Activities

In July 2017 Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) acquired a chatbot startup called Joe Hukum, which too was based out of Gurgaon. Later, in the same year, an another Gurgaon based AI chatbot startup iDelivr got acquired by Phonon Communications.

The year 2017 was dominated by various chatbot activities as Amazon launched chatbot tools for developers, to help them build chat features into their own app while Microsoft launched India-specific chatbot called Ruuh, which later got wind up by the company however.

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An engineer by education and writer by profession, Suman keeps tab on startup ecosystem of India and leads the research team of IndiaWeb2 for covering funding deals, merger & acquisition and market reports.